Water Stress Is a Supply Chain Risk: Learn How Brands and Manufacturers Are Taking Action Today

Article key points: 

• Water stress is intensifying in key textile manufacturing regions—and brands that haven’t mapped supplier exposure are accumulating operational and reputational risk.
• Kontoor Brands and Elevate Textiles reduced fresh water use at the mill level by up to 90% through The Indigood™ Program—demonstrating what’s achievable when brands and manufacturers align on shared goals.
• Sub-metering is foundational: Without granular water measurement, it’s impossible to benchmark baselines and see progress. 
• Water reduction delivers ROI beyond water savings. Energy costs, chemical use, and production cycle times all improve when water consumption drops.
• Worldly provides facility-level visibility into water stress, water vulnerability, and adaptive measures taken that helps brands and suppliers make smarter, more targeted decisions about where to act first.

Water stress is the supply chain risk hiding in plain sight

For the past decade, decarbonization has dominated the sustainability conversation for consumer goods companies. Carbon targets, Scope 3 methodologies, and emissions dashboards have commanded attention and investment. Meanwhile, a different risk has been progressing quietly in the background, and it’s more immediate than many companies realize. This risk is water stress, the inability to meet the human and ecological demand for water. 

While climate change is the obvious threat so many businesses and governments have been trying to mitigate for decades, water stress is the sharp point that is going to really hurt people, communities, business, and the environment.

How a foam dyeing program became a water reduction movement

Conventional indigo dyeing is one of denim manufacturing’s most water-intensive steps. The United Nations estimates that producing a single pair of jeans can consume thousands of liters of water across cotton production, dyeing, and finishing.

Kontoor Brands, home to Wrangler and Lee, set an ambitious goal of saving 10 billion liters of fresh water by 2025. It achieved that target two years early.

A key driver was The Indigood™ Program, which Kontoor developed in collaboration with denim manufacturers including Cone Denim, part of Elevate Textiles. IndiGood™ originally centered on foam dyeing—a process that applies indigo as a foam on yarn rather than submerging it in water, eliminating water from the dyeing step entirely and cutting water use by more than 95 percent.

What made the program scalable was a critical decision to become technology-agnostic. Rather than requiring a single process, Kontoor opened The Indigood™ Program to any technology that demonstrably reduced water consumption. That shift made it viable for more manufacturers to participate on their own terms—and created the conditions for Elevate Textiles to engage.

“When they opened it up and became technology agnostic,” Summers explained, “that made the business case something intriguing to us.”

As a result, water use at participating mills reduced by up to 90 percent through a combination of methods like reverse osmosis water recycling and zero liquid discharge systems. 

Elevate Textiles shares lessons learned

Elevate Textiles operates more than 40 manufacturing facilities around the world, including dye houses under the Cone Denim, American & Efird Thread, and Burlington Industries brands. Water stewardship was already a priority for the company, which had set a goal to reduce its water footprint 40 percent by 2030, against a 2019 baseline. With more than 30 of its mills participating in The Indigood™ Program, three have achieved IndiGood™’s Gold Status, which means they conserve over 90 percent of the water used in their processes. 

Summers describes five major takeaways from the company’s participation and results with The Indigood™ Program. 

1. Sub-metering changes what’s possible

Most manufacturers track water at the facility level: total intake, one meter, one number. That aggregate view makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint where water is actually being consumed, or where reductions would have the most impact.

Sub-metering breaks that measurement down. It means adding meters at individual process points: the dye house, specific machines or banks of machines, humidification systems, utility areas. The result is granular visibility into water use that enables real benchmarking—against industry peers, against internal targets, and against improvement over time.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” Summers said. “We discovered that there were some key areas where we did not understand our water consumption the way we thought we did.”

Sub-metering requires upfront investment, but the data it generates makes every subsequent decision more precise.

2.ROI on water conservation isn’t where you think 

One of the most useful insights from Elevate Textiles’ experience is that the financial case for water reduction rarely comes from the cost of water itself. In many manufacturing regions, water remains inexpensive. The business case lives elsewhere.

Heating water is energy-intensive. Reducing water volume reduces energy consumption—and energy costs are substantial. Chemical usage often correlates directly with water volume. Wastewater treatment and recycling systems cost less to operate when there’s less water flowing through them. And reducing rinse cycles and water-dependent steps can shorten production cycle times, unlocking capacity.

“The savings that we get on energy… and the chemical savings—that’s where the bang for the buck is,” Summers noted. “Water, unfortunately, is still relatively free or low cost in a lot of places. But the related costs add up.”

3. Process change requires trust, not just technology

Reducing water in a dyeing process isn’t just an equipment question. It’s also a quality question. Dyers work with precision; shade consistency and repeatability depend on tightly controlled variables. Changing the water balance in a process introduces risk of inconsistent quality.

Summers described the challenge candidly: “It’s like coming into a five-star restaurant and telling a gourmet chef you’re going to start taking ingredients away, but they still have to produce that top-notch meal. They understandably get very defensive.”

The path through that resistance is incremental: small trials, early wins, and the involvement of technical teams from both sides. That process takes time—but it’s also how durable operational change gets made.

4. Brand-supplier alignment is key 

The IndiGood™ partnership works because it treats water reduction as a shared objective, not a compliance requirement. Kontoor set the goal and then looped in its manufacturing partners to see where there was alignment. It then invited manufacturers to lead the way on the technology and approach. Altogether, the program produced measurable outcomes. 

This structure distributed the agency and accountability across multiple stakeholders. It also helped that the relationship between Kontoor and Elevate Textiles extended beyond a single season. Water reduction investments—zero liquid discharge systems, sub-metering infrastructure, process trials—have payback periods of three to five years or more. Brands that signal long-term partnership make it financially viable for suppliers to invest.

“The brands that are showing leadership—signaling that we’re with you—help allay the concern over that time horizon mismatch,” Summers said. “If there was some way to formalize it, I think that would really unlock a lot of investment.”

Summers also offered a clear message to brands tempted to recapture efficiency savings through price pressure:

For suppliers, his advice was more direct: Don’t wait for a brand mandate to get started. The win-win-win opportunities—water, energy, chemical, and quality improvements together—are often larger than expected. Start with one facility, get technical teams engaged, and build from early wins.

5. View water stress at the facility level 

A recurring theme in the conversation with Elevate Textiles was the gap between what companies think they know about water risk and what the data actually shows. Country-level assessments are a starting point, but they mask the variation that matters most for sourcing and investment decisions. For example, a facility in a high water-stress region that operates a robust recycling and zero liquid discharge system carries meaningfully different risks than a neighboring facility without those controls. 

Looking at water risk from only the country perspective won’t give those types of insights that can help brands choose suppliers with both the best risk profiles and best sustainability practices. 

Worldly Axion uncovers the hidden risks in your supply chain — including water stress

Water stress isn’t the only risk affecting your supply chain: But it is a large one. Today’s leading brands, retailers, and manufacturers need a solution that can capture their full supply chain risk profile and show them where to mitigate risk and plan for the future.

 Worldly Axion combines facility-level performance data with regional and country context, giving brands, retailers, and manufacturers a clearer picture of where risks from heat, water stress, geopolitical factors, and other impact areas are highest—and where supplier action is already reducing exposure. 

Rather than sorting suppliers by geography alone, teams that use Worldly Axion along with their supply chain assessments can identify where targeted engagement will have the most impact and what collaboration approaches are most likely to succeed.

As water scarcity continues to affect manufacturing regions, the ability to act on facility-level insight—rather than country-level averages—will determine which supply chains are positioned to stay resilient.

Get a demo of Worldly Axion today.